The Need

Companies need a better way to create, manage, and administer sales compensation plans.  The nearly universal thicket of complex, multi-layered, interlocking spreadsheets must become a single coherent system that models the sales force's compensation and reflects how it advances the company's business goals.

The current method sometimes produces conflicting goals and nobody even pretends to really understand how all the spreadsheets work or whether the plans actually advance the corporation's business goals and strategy.  Even minor changes to the plan create major revisions to the spreadsheets - spreadsheets with a poor track record for accuracy and intelligibility.

Then there is the problem of payment, far too much time spent calculating who is owed what.  And even more time spent by the recipients to check if accounting got it right!

The Challenge

Compensation planning and administration needs to be simpler, more reliable.  It must enable changes without causing massive angst or introducing yet another round of spreadsheet errors.  The sales team needs to trust the results and be able to see the data on which compensation is based.  Management needs a way to assure the plans complement each other as part of an overall corporate strategy.

The new system, to be offered as a service to a wide range of businesses, must scale far beyond the size of any individual business.  It must also allow the developer to quickly, easily, and safely accommodate the unique operational needs and wants of each customer.

The ReFrame Application Service Grid Solution

A powerful and flexible set of services were created and deployed on the ReFrame Application Service Grid.  These services operate as a whole to produce a complete compensation planning and management system.

Individual services on the ReFrame Application Service Grid take in sales data through ReFrame adapters and allocate them to each payee.  Another service provides the sophisticated logic that calculates payments and turns each employee's results into a personalized spreadsheet that is automatically emailed on a predictable schedule.  Other services factor in bonus plans and incentive payments.

Additional services allow management to graphically see the interaction between the various compensation plans to assure the company's overall goals are being served.  These services connect to end users through a ReFrame Adapter into a Rich Internet Interface (RIA).

A ReFrame Adapter allows interaction with the third-party database that records and tracks customer orders and shipments.

Scale, Change, Scale, Change ...

This system was designed to scale to tens of thousands of payees and millions of transactions.  The ReFrame Application Service Grid allows the services, or portions of them, to be distributed across as many additional computers as needed to achieve the required levels of performance and throughput.

ReFrame enables you to quickly, easily, and safely accommodate the changing size and shape of your business.